I don't know if anyone has had any experience of this, but is there any easy method of converting PAL DVD's to NTSC DVD's
without having to rip to a avi file and recompress the frame size?
Yeah. Something like that. I am from the UK but now I live in the States. I have a bunch of PAL dvd's but I would like to run them on NTSC Players. I have a mutli-region player, but It would be nice to convert them to NTSC so I could loan them to friends.
Well you can always rip them to make a NTSC copy. But how legal it is to convert your own movies to NTSC i dont know? Guess you cannot watch your PAL version at the same time
Well this is the hard way.
Make the entire film i BMPs. Then put the bitmaps in your editor thats is set to 24p. Output to an AVI. then use TMPGEnc to make the 24p movie NTSC-comp.
Then take the audio and change the speed to match 23,97 fps of the movie.
i also am not sure of the legality. I thought you were allowed to make a backup copy of a dvd you owned. I own the movies, I just want to be able to watch them again and you cant buy ntsc versions of the shows. I dont know if changing the region makes that illegal. One of those gray areas i guess.
Well, because you're altering the video signal, not making a back-up. I'd just think there may be an issue...
Plus, if the DVD isn't available here, you'd run into issues I think - it's why they have different regions of DVDs and such, so that you can only access a movie in the country it's meant to be accessed in.
If a film hasn't been released yet in said country, they don't want video copies getting out, because it'll affect the theatrical release, for example.
I just don't know that it is legal, but I also don't know that it's illegal - it just seems like more of a deal than simply copying the file.
I can undertand the region thing being a problem. That is true that different places have different region DVDs so DVD's being released in one place don't interfere with theatrical releases.
Converting from PAL to NTSC and back though isn't illegal. The reasons behind the two formats do not have to do with anything legal.
British television shows and coverage are converted to NTSC and broadcasted in north america completely legally. They're simply different formats so I don't think converting from one to the other is illegal.
The region thing on the DVD however would pose some legal problems.
Thing is though, Thinspirit, that those shows are most likely delivered by the British networks already converted; they did it themselves. They had to give permission for it to be aired in the first place, and once that permission is had, then there's no issue.
Converting to PAL or NTSC isn't the issue - you can convert a movie you make into whatever format you like - the issue is the copyrighting (which works hand in hand *with* the region issue, as well)
Right... and in Canada there's no law against copying what you own to back it up... that is exactly what he's doing. The only difference is the format he's backing it up in which doesn't matter. If you owned a music cd for example, it is perfectly legal to copy it into your computer as MP3 files. You have changed the format of the information, it is no less legal however. That is simply all he's doing.